Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (73 page)

This is where controversy takes over. A grieving, stunned nation couldn’t cope with these events. Rumors and speculation began to fly as the country learned of the strange life of Lee Harvey Oswald—that he was an ex-marine who had defected to Russia and come back with a Russian wife; that he was a Marxist and a Castro admirer; that he had recently been to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City.

Responding to these rumors, which were growing to include the suggestion that Lyndon Johnson himself was part of the conspiracy, LBJ decided to appoint a commission to investigate the assassination and to determine whether any conspiracy existed. After his first week in office, Johnson asked Chief Justice Earl Warren to head the investigation. Warren reluctantly accepted the job when Johnson said that he feared nuclear war might result if the Cubans or Soviets proved to be behind the assassination.

The commission was appointed on November 29, 1963. Besides Chief Justice Earl Warren, the other members were Senator Richard B. Russell, Democrat of Georgia; Senator John S. Cooper, Republican of Kentucky; Representative T. Hale Boggs, Democrat of Louisiana; Representative Gerald R. Ford, Republican of Michigan; Allen W. Dulles, former director of the CIA; and John J. McCloy, former adviser to President Kennedy. During ten months, the commission took testimony from 552 witnesses.

The Warren Report was a summary of events related to the assassination issued in September 1964. It concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy from a window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. The report also said that Jack Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald on November 24, 1963. The report found no evidence of a conspiracy involving Oswald and Ruby. It criticized the U.S. Secret Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and it asked for better measures in the future to protect the president.

But almost immediately after the Warren Report was issued, other investigations criticized the report’s findings. In the decades since the Warren Commission tried to calm a very skittish nation, those findings are still viewed skeptically by a majority of the American public. The commission’s detective work left much to be desired, and in later years, major new revelations followed. During the late 1970s, a special committee of the U.S. House of Representatives reexamined the evidence. It concluded that Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” In particular, shocking facts were produced by the investigations into the activities of the CIA and the FBI during the 1970s. Among other startling discoveries, these investigations by a presidential commission and Congress uncovered the CIA’s plans for assassinating Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders; that Kennedy’s mistress Judith Campbell was also involved with the two gangsters hired by the CIA to kill Castro; and that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had ordered a cover-up of bureau failures in the Oswald investigation in an effort to protect the bureau’s integrity and public image.

Were there only three shots fired by someone in the Texas School Book Depository? Was Oswald the gunman who fired them? Or were other shots fired from the grassy knoll overlooking the route of the motorcade? Was Jack Ruby, who was both connected to the Dallas underworld and a friend of Dallas policemen, simply acting, as he said, to spare Mrs. Kennedy the pain of returning to Dallas to testify at a murder trial? Who were the two “Latins” that a New Orleans prostitute said she encountered on their way to Dallas a few days before the murder? Did “hundreds of witnesses” to the incident and investigation die suspiciously, as several conspiracy theorists claim?

More than 2,000 books have been written about the case since JFK’s death, from attorney Mark Lane’s
Rush to Judgment
and Edward Jay Epstein’s
Inquest
to David Lifton’s
Best Evidence
and David Scheim’s
Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy.
All have relied on serious flaws in the Warren investigation as well as material the Warren Commission never saw to support a variety of possible conspiracies. All have been greeted by a public feeding frenzy.

Far less sensational is
Final Disclosure,
a 1989 book that refutes all these theories, written by David W. Belin, the counsel to the Warren Commission and executive director of the Rockefeller Commission investigating abuses by the CIA. Obviously Belin, as a key staff member of the Warren Commission, had a personal interest to protect. But his book is well reasoned and amply supported by evidence. Examining the Warren Commission’s total evidence, the subsequent CIA and FBI revelations, and the analysis of a controversial audio tape that supposedly proved the existence of a fourth shot and a second gunman, Belin deflated the most serious charges brought by the conspiracists, often by showing they have made highly selective use of evidence and testimony.

Far more exhaustive and comprehensive, and more controversial, than Belin’s book is
Case Closed
by Gerald Posner. Using new technological resources and sophisticated computer studies, Posner reached an unambiguous and rather unassailable conclusion: Lee Harvey Oswald indeed acted alone, as did Jack Ruby. Writes Posner, “There is more than enough evidence available on the record to draw conclusions about what happened in the JFK assassination. But apparently most Americans, despite the strength of the evidence, do not want to accept the notion that random acts of violence can change the course of history and that Lee Harvey Oswald could affect our lives in a way over which we have no control. It is unsettling to think that a sociopathic twenty-four-year-old loser in life, armed with a $12 rifle and consumed by his own warped motivation, ended Camelot. But for readers willing to approach this subject with an open mind, it is the only rational judgment.”

Even so, that missing-tooth feeling remains for many Americans. While the arguments are convincing that Oswald and then Ruby acted alone, it seems that few people were willing to accept that conclusion. Their skepticism was one more indication of the deep-seated mistrust and lack of faith Americans had come to have in their government and political leadership.

Must Read:
Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK
by Gerald Posner.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

From
LYNDON JOHNSON’S
“Great Society” speech (May 1964):

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

In this speech, delivered during his election campaign against Republican Barry Goldwater, Johnson laid out the foundation for the ambitious domestic social program he carried out after his landslide victory over the conservative senator from Arizona. Johnson proposed attacking racial injustice through economic and educational reforms and government programs aimed at ending the cycle of poverty. The legislative record he then compiled was impressive, although social historians argue over its ultimate effectiveness. The Office of Economic Opportunity was created. Kennedy’s proposed civil rights bill was passed, followed by a Voting Rights Act and the establishments of Project Head Start, the Job Corps, and Medicaid and Medicare. But while Johnson was carrying out the most ambitious social revolution since FDR’s New Deal, he was also leading the country deeper and deeper into Vietnam. And that futile and disastrous path, more than any of his domestic initiatives, would mark Johnson’s place in history.

Did
Mississippi Burning
really happen?

If Hollywood gets its way, the civil rights movement was saved when Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe rolled into town like two gunslinging Western marshals. In this revisionist cinematic version of history, two FBI men bring truth and vigilante justice to the nasty Ku Klux Klan while a bunch of bewildered Negroes meekly stand by, shuffling and avoiding trouble.

The 1989 film
Mississippi Burning
was an emotional roller coaster. It was difficult to watch without being moved, breaking into a sweat, and finally cheering when the forces of good terrorized the redneck Klansmen into telling where the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers were buried. The movie gave audiences the feeling of seeing history unfold. But in the grand tradition of American filmmaking, this version of events had as much to do with reality as did D. W. Griffith’s racist “classic,”
Birth of a Nation.

The movie opens with the backroads murder of three young civil rights activists in the summer of 1964. That much is true. Working to register black voters, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two whites from the North, and James Chaney, a black southerner, disappeared after leaving police custody in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In the film, two FBI agents arrive to investigate, but get nowhere as local rednecks stonewall the FBI and blacks are too fearful to act. The murderers are not exposed until Agent Anderson (Gene Hackman), a former southern sheriff who has joined the FBI, begins a campaign of illegal tactics to terrorize the locals into revealing where the bodies are buried and who is responsible.

It is a brilliantly made, plainly manipulative film that hits all the right emotional notes: white liberal guilt over the treatment of blacks; disgust at the white-trash racism of the locals; excitement at Hackman’s Rambo-style tactics; and, finally, vindication in the murderers’ convictions.

The problem is that besides the murders, few of the events depicted happened that way. Pressed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a large contingent of agents to Mississippi, but they learned nothing. The case was broken only when Klan informers were offered a $30,000 bribe and the bodies of the three men were found in a nearby dam site. Twenty-one men were named in the indictment, including the local police chief and his deputy. But local courts later dismissed the confessions of the two Klansmen as hearsay. The Justice Department persisted by bringing conspiracy charges against eighteen of the men. Tried before a judge who had once compared blacks to chimpanzees, seven of the accused were nonetheless convicted and sentenced to jail terms ranging from three to ten years.

Although J. Edgar Hoover put on a good public show of anti-Klan FBI work, it masked his real obsession at the time. To the director, protecting civil rights workers was a waste of his bureau’s time. Although the film depicts a black agent, the only blacks employed by the bureau during Hoover’s tenure as head were his chauffeurs. The FBI was far more interested in trying to prove that Martin Luther King was a Communist and that the civil rights movement was an organized Communist front. Part of this effort was the high-level attempt to eavesdrop on King’s private life, an effort that did prove that the civil rights leader had his share of white female admirers willing to contribute more than just money to the cause. Hoover’s hatred of King boiled over at one point when he called King “the most notorious liar” in the country. Another part of this effort involved sending King a threatening note suggesting he commit suicide.

What was the Tonkin Resolution?

When is a war not a war? When the president decides it isn’t, and Congress goes along.

America was already more than ten years into its Vietnam commitment when Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy’s best and brightest holdovers decided to find a new version of Pearl Harbor. An incident was needed to pull American firepower into the war with at least a glimmer of legitimacy. It came in August 1964 with a brief encounter in the Gulf of Tonkin, the waters off the coast of North Vietnam.

In the civil war that was raging between North and South since the French withdrawal from Indochina and the partition of Vietnam in 1954, the United States had committed money, material, advice, and, by the end of 1963, some 15,000 military advisers in support of the anti-Communist Saigon government. The American CIA was also in the thick of things, having helped foster the coup that toppled Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 and then acting surprised when Diem was executed by the army officers who overthrew him.

Among the other “advice” the United States provided to its South Vietnamese allies was to teach them commando tactics. In 1964, CIA-trained guerrillas from the South began to attack the North in covert acts of sabotage. Code named Plan 34-A, these commando raids failed to undermine North Vietnam’s military strength, so the mode of attack was shifted to hit-and-run operations by small torpedo boats. To support these assaults, the U.S. Navy posted warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, loaded with electronic eavesdropping equipment enabling them to monitor North Vietnamese military operations and provide intelligence to the South Vietnamese commandos.

Coming as it did in the midst of LBJ’s 1964 campaign against hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater, President Johnson felt the incident called for a tough response. Johnson had the Navy send the
Maddox
and a second destroyer, the
Turner Joy,
back into the Gulf of Tonkin. A radar man on the
Turner Joy
saw some blips, and that boat opened fire. On the
Maddox,
there were also reports of incoming torpedoes, and the
Maddox
began to fire. There was never any confirmation that either ship had actually been attacked. Later, the radar blips would be attributed to weather conditions and jittery nerves among the crew.